Traditionally, many personal relationships and marriages were arranged by families. In addition, the intimacy of small town communities provided many chances for couples to meet, get to know each other, and form relationships. However, as the pace of life has accelerated, and as populations have become more urbanized, people have found that their lifestyles and schedules provide them with fewer opportunities to meet potential partners with whom to form relationships. Consequently, many people have turned to less traditional means of finding potential mates.
For example, people seeking dates have used personal ads as a means to meet others with similar interests. In these ads, the person seeking a match provides information about his or her own personality traits and about the traits he or she desires in others. With the exception of a few items, such as sex, race, and age, however, there is little uniformity in the information included in these ads. Because the persons placing these ads could only predict the types of information that a reader would want in deciding whether to arrange to meet, many of these ads failed to produce successful matches. The lack of uniformity, and the unorganized nature of classified ads, also requires the reader to expend extensive amounts of time sorting through the ads to find a potential match. There is no quick way for the reader to quickly scan through these ads to eliminate those persons who possess unacceptable traits. Moreover, the lack of uniformity in the ads may prevent a reader from obtaining information about a trait that the reader deemed to be essential in a potential mate.
Computer dating services provided a more organized method of classifying users, and of providing a way to quickly screen candidates. Those services, however, still failed to provide adequate compatible matches in many cases. Detailed information about the operation of such dating systems is not generally available, however, it is believed that most computer dating systems fall into two basic types: (1) linear matching; and (2) one-way compatibility screening.
In the first type of dating service, the person seeking a date is asked to answer a questionnaire and characterize himself or herself according to a limited set of criteria. These criteria usually include physical characteristics such as age, weight, race, and marital status, along with psychological characteristics such as extroversion/introversion. After entering this data into the computer, the computer dating service compares this new data to that already contained in the questionnaires filled out by other subscribers to find those that have similar characteristics. This similar/non-similar type of matching fails to take into account the fact that persons may place different emphasis on a trait in others than on a trait that they themselves exhibit. Moreover, this type of matching fails to account for the fact that males and females place significantly different emphasis on the weighting of factors and also have significantly different tolerances for variability in factors.
The second type of traditional dating service solves some but not all of these problems. Such a service asks the user to fill out not just one questionnaire about their own traits, but also another questionnaire indicating the characteristics desired in a potential match. The dating service then uses the criteria specified in the second questionnaire to search through the pool of users and find potential matches. While such a method accounts for the individual desires of the person seeking a match, it fails to account for how desirable the match would find the user. Thus, while the potential match may fit the criteria of the person seeking the match, there is no attempt to determine whether the match will find the other person compatible (i.e., a two-way match). Under such a system, for example, a user who did not want to date potential matches with children would never receive a match with children, however, this same user could be used as a match for someone with children, thus resulting in an incompatible pairing.
Prior computer dating systems thus have failed to employ two-way matching and to utilize a numerical method of evaluating potential matches instead of a similar/not-similar approach. Those systems have also failed to provide an efficient method to eliminate unduly restrictive or irrational matching criteria and to adjust for gender and generational differences among users. Finally, existing computer dating systems have failed to account for the problem of users who infrequently use the system and are therefore unlikely to respond if used as matches for other users.
Many of the same problems arise in compatibility screening situations outside the field of computer dating. The unorganized and non-uniform nature of ads is not limited to personal ads but is indicative of most classified ads. Thus, persons trying to match their qualifications to an employer's job criteria have faced many of the same problems. Likewise, job search firms that utilize automated screening methods have not employed numerical methods of comparing matching candidates to prospective opportunities and have failed to implement systems to adjust the matching criteria so as to maximize the likelihood of finding a compatible match. Moreover, these firms have not utilized two-way matching of relevant characteristics. Thus, for example, these systems attempt to find a job candidate based on an employer's criteria without considering the desirability of the job or opportunity from the employee's view.